September 3, 2018: Tax Cuts for Fat Cats - Pay Freeze for Federal Workers

 

9/3/18: It’s Labor Day, a day to honor the working men and women of the nation. Last week, Trump announced that 1.8 million federal workers would have to forego a scheduled 2.1% pay raise in October. 

The man who just blew a gigantic hole in the federal deficit (see: 8/15/18) informed Congress that the nation could not afford to pay. “We must maintain efforts to put our nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases.” 

Billionaires and multimillionaires, the nation’s fattest cats? Yes, what America needed most and Republicans in Congress and the fat cat in the Oval Office delivered, were tax cuts for the richest. As Trump once said to all the chubby, chunky cats at Mar-a-Lago, after he pushed through those cuts, “You all just got a lot richer!”

If you had tens of billions of dollars, like David Koch, you got a tax cut.

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LESS THAN 24 HOURS LATER, having announced that the nation could not afford a small raise for federal workers, Republicans awoke to the fact that this was not the best look politically, heading into midterms. To the untrained eye it appeared the GOP cared more for billionaires than for the “little guy.” 

They do. They just don’t want truck drivers, waitresses, carpenters, and car mechanics to get wise. 

With Republicans up for re-election sounding the alarm, Trump quickly buckled.

 

“I’m going to be studying, you know, the federal workers in Washington that you’ve been reading so much about,” he told reporters the day after saying there’d be no raise. “People don’t want to give them any increase. They haven’t had one in a long time,” he offered in way of mitigation. “People” didn’t want to give them a raise. In other words, it wasn’t his fault! It never is. He cares about those workers. Yes, he does! They haven’t had a raise “in a long time.” 

“I said I’m going to study that over the weekend,” he tells reporters. “It’s a good time to study it – Labor Day. Let’s see how they do next week. But a lot of people were against it. I’m going to take a good hard look over the weekend.” 

Federal workers: stay tuned.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: On January 1, 2019, the president freezes federal worker’s pay for the coming year. He waits until after the midterms to stiff the little guys.

No pay raise for federal employees.